CHAPTER ONE
DEBT
You think you’re a body, but you’re not. That’s just the container you collect in. Your body’s a light bulb. If it burns out or breaks, the electricity’s still there—you’re still there, still you.
Benjamin Franklin Hopper was born into a shattered bulb, shards buried under the loose, gray silt of a ravaged Texas plain, but his energy never diffused. For seventeen years, he hovered in particles over the heads of his family as they plowed their soil too fine, dodging tightfisted bankers, riding the Okie trail, Route 66, sleeping under railroad bridges, in lean-tos made of potato sacks, flattened tin cans, and orange crates. He hovered as they built a canvas-and-cardboard home just off the levee at the confluence of two rivers—the clear American and the muddy Sacramento.
No, he didn’t stay underground back in the gray Texas dirt. He rose in a silty cloud and floated over their heads for seventeen years, waiting for a shape to fill.
Finally, under pressure, his sister cracked. Though she didn’t shatter—not yet—that hairline fracture created a vacuum in her, a charged emptiness that siphoned his particles to her, causing a surge to her filament, making her glow.
That’s how she would explain it to herself.
JANE walked home on the levee that night, no breeze coming off the delta. After a long day picking, her arms were sticky yellow, the tomato-leaf smell of piney, bitter sunlight under her fingernails. The river was finally slowing after months of running fast and clean with melted Sierra snow. In Indian summer, with the grass bleached white and the blue burnt out of the sky, she looked down as she walked home from the field, even at night, in case a rattler stretched fat across the path in the heat. That may be why she didn’t see at first what was happening in front of her as she approached the campsite.
Uno Jeffers’s headlights shone on the dirt between his Ford and her family’s tent, the Cotton Bollers loud on his radio—“Lace up them boots, let leather meet tar.” His car was loaded with their things: shovel, mattress, blankets, pots, crowbar, washtub, Jane’s hope chest of books and awards, everything they’d carted from Amarillo to Sacramento in the great caravan of Okies. Everything they’d collected since.
Daddy’s banjo and hat were on the dirt, not in the tent, not in the car.
Momma stepped out of the tent, full belly first, squinting into the headlights, her black hair frizzing like ideas shooting out of her scalp.
“Where’s Daddy?” Jane asked.
Momma spit out a toothpick. “In town. With Elthea.”
ELTHEA was married to dumpy Leroy Lathrop, editor of a skid row newspaper, the Swale. She herself owned Do or Donut Shop, a base from which she was able to meet up weekly with Daddy, who seemed to like her feminine smell of maple.
Just the Sunday before, for what seemed like the hundredth time, Jane had walked for donuts with Daddy and witnessed it.
Elthea came out to the counter from the back room when the front doorbell jangled.
“Abraham Lincoln Hopper.”
Daddy smiled, putting off heat. Neither of them said anything for a good minute while Jane focused her eyes on the display case, thinking, Order the damn donut.
But instead of that, he started singing as if Elthea were the only person on earth who might understand just how misunderstood he was—“Big man stoopin’ so low, gotta stand up some day.” He sang it hoarse, hitting some notes off-key, lingering a beat long on words you might not expect. He made the air quiver around him like heat waves that distract you from your blisters while you walk.
He delivered this particular performance in a sulfur-yellow donut shop for a chubby waitress on a Sunday morning with no less style than he conjured every Saturday night for paying customers—scab-armed pickers, sitting on dirt, tilting beer, tithing a dime each to Abraham.
When he finished singing, Elthea clapped real slow and rocked her curls back and forth in appreciation, the moist flesh around her collar turning pink.
Momma didn’t react that way to his talents anymore.
Daddy smiled, his teeth white under a scruffy mustache.
“Do you need some help with the boxes, Elthea?”
“I always need help with the boxes, Abraham.”
“I’m gonna help Elthea with the boxes, Jujee.”
He followed her to the back room, his eyes on her wide hips in a tight white uniform.
Jane moved without a donut to the front booth under the window and watched people pass on their way to the market. She licked her finger and pressed it on each donut crumb left behind on the table, one at a time, bringing it to the tip of her tongue.
Just the week before, she’d dropped a fat envelope of her Daily Dragon clippings on the corner of Leroy’s desk. She’d told Daddy about her plan to get on at that newspaper. He knew about her plan. It would ruin things for her if Leroy showed up wanting to see his wife and found her in back with Daddy.
She wandered up to the counter and cocked her head at the coffee mugs jiggling on the back wall shelves, at the back room breathing, like a pierced heart and lung, that burbling release of liquid and steam. Her eyebrows lowered.
She went to the front door and locked it, flipping the OPEN sign to CLOSED.
She sat at the counter and wrote on a napkin to the beat of the jiggling mugs and the flow of their breath. When she finished, she went behind the counter and used a wax paper square to pick up a maple old-fashioned, took one bite, and set it back on the shelf. She also took a bite of a sprinkle and a bear claw and a cinnamon roll, carefully turning the bite marks back to the wall when she was done. Then she returned to her seat at the front table.
A few minutes later, Daddy came back, flushed and messy.
Elthea waved goodbye, her dimpled fingers close up to her eyes, waggling like lashes.
It must have done something for Daddy to leave her alone at that table while he went off to rut with Elthea every week and then came back to find her waiting there. It may have been a test of her loyalty or taste or of Daddy’s appeal. It may even have been his idea that it was a gift to include her in his life this way. Or maybe he was teaching her something about the way of things between women and men, about the necessary differences between them.
For some months, it looked like a donut would pay for it—she was, after all, a hungry girl—but not anymore. Didn’t he care what she was trying to do? He was putting something big at risk for her now. She didn’t like this feeling, when two things she wanted conflicted. It made her want to choose one fast and forget the other, to make the confusion go away.
Back at the tent, she wrote the napkin story in her notebook and called it “Donut Ass.” That didn’t change anything, but it made her feel better to write it, scratching an itch.
MOMMA had always said Jane was gonna do something. Not that she was something, but that she was gonna do something. Momma never said what that something might be, but still it shone in the distance, like Jane’s North Star.
Growing up, whenever she’d brought home a B-plus in English or a science fair ribbon, her raised eyebrows would ask, Is this it? Is this the thing I’m gonna do? Momma’s silence was the answer—That ain’t it—so Jane would fold up her achievement and file it in her hope chest, one more artifact in the historical record of Not Quite Yet. Though Jane didn’t know what she was going to do, she did know why she had to keep trying.